FECUND CONTAGION FOR THE MASS MEDIA

Orazio Petrosillo

Vatican expert from "Il Messaggero"

The mass media are living an identity crisis, provoked as always by the ever-more heavy conditioning of economic powers which have transformed them into a product to sell or a vehicle of publicity messages. The consequence is a loss of autonomy which translates into a drastic drop in creativity and a decadence in sensibility in the choice of themes to propose. In this commercial aggression, religious information, because of its otherness, is the first to be conditioned by it and altered.

It is to be hoped that the coming Jubilee, connected to the bimillennium of the birth of Christ and the entry of our Western society into the third millennium, will be carried in the interest of the mass media. They could already undergo moments of reflection in these years of preparation and an examination of conscience to which the Pope has invited the Church and the whole society, and in a particular way the "mea culpa" suggested to Christians. Once the holy door is opened, and during the whole year 2000, the Jubilee will offer themes to thoroughly examine which the mass media cannot fail to relaunch: on the centrality of Christ in history, on the Christian sense of time, on the epic turning point of our civilization.

On the whole I am not very optimistic about the possibility of recreating the same climate which was created with the Council, because of the greater degradation and the lesser enthusiasm towards the spiritual problems which I detect in today's mass media with respect to that of 35 years ago.

It should also be said that the Second Vatican Council was a new fact for our century, and of truly universal proportion. It was the first time that an assembly so cosmopolitan, of more than 2,000 council fathers from all the nations of the earth, yet so united in the same faith and around the head of their College, the Pope, around whom they came together and discussed. That could not fail to arouse the attention and the understandable curiosity of the public opinion of the world.

Even the internal dialectic of the assembly and the not-always-idyllic relationship between Rome and some episcopates gave reason for many articulated journalistic projects, for an enthralling debate even in secular newspapers. One wanted to understand the great efforts of the Catholic Church, its updating, its dialogue with the contemporary world and with other religions. Furthermore, the canceler debate looked at all the thematics of the Christian faith with an abundance of variety of arguments involving even extra-ecclesial interests.

The Jubilee does not have the same variety of themes, and of itself does not propose an updating, a revision of the attitude of the Church as it did for the ecumenical council. However there is a diversity in the possibility of involvement. Nevertheless, Tertio Millennio Adveniente of Pope John Paul II emphasized the Jubilee as prefiguring a parallel between Conciliar updating and Jubilee conversion. For that reason, when all is said and done, the climate of the year 2000 could infect the mass media as it did in the four-year period of 1962-1965.